In spring 2008, I had the opportunity to interview playwright and theater director Richard Foreman for the Yale School of Drama’s annual alumni magazine. The interview was too lengthy to publish in full, so the first half appeared in print (and is available online here), while the second half — a questionnaire or survey inspired by the tradition of the French Surrealists — was shelved. Richard’s recent passing provides a fitting occasion to share the questionnaire portion of our conversation publicly for the first time. – January 16, 2025

JOSEPH CERMATORI: For the second half of this interview, I have ten or eleven words, phrases, or ideas. I’m interested in what your feelings toward these things were forty years ago, as opposed to what your feelings toward them are now, just to get a sense of the shape between the past and the present.

RICHARD FOREMAN: Sounds good.

CERMATORI: The first is: “spirituality,” the spiritual element in your work.

FOREMAN: I don’t think that’s changed too much. I said years ago that I was a closet religious writer, and I think that was always a tendency. The only way that it’s changed is I’m more open about saying it now, and because I read a great deal I have more intellectual tools for being able to discuss it and explain it. But even though the big influence in my life was Brecht, and nobody could accuse him of being a religious writer, nevertheless I was always concerned with the problem of what does a single human being do with his given consciousness here on this planet. What are you supposed to do with that? And I look at that as a spiritual concern. And that’s what I’ve always been obsessed with.

CERMATORI: Second: “the way art ought to respond to history and to current events.”

FOREMAN: You can’t help it. For many years, people said “You know, he’s so esoteric, he’s cut off from the world.” But actually I’ve done a number of plays that have had direct social, political relevance. I did a play after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of Russia called Now That Communism is Dead My Life Feels Empty. I did King Cowboy Rufus Rules the Universe—guess which president that was supposed to be—before other people were talking a lot about Mr. Bush and what was going on. Even the play that I’m doing this year, which seems to be really quite esoteric, elements creep in. I’m living in a world, so we have this huge hummingbird come in onstage. And somehow the hummingbird ended up having American flags on him, and to me it is resonant with something about America’s looming, somewhat oppressive (to some people) position in the world. This hummingbird is the big American hummingbird that might be a big airplane flying over certain countries. I don’t know. So one is always a filter for all kinds of things that are in the air. And living in these times, how can you not also be filtering the political and social realities?

CERMATORI: What about: “the audience”? The ideas of getting people together in a room to watch a play, and how those people inevitably respond to what they see?

FOREMAN: From the very beginning, I said I was not making my plays for audiences. I was making my plays for myself. I put them onstage because I like the real three dimensional aspect of the concrete nature of the theater. So I’m working in concrete 3-D, and then I do them in public, which is getting increasingly difficult for me psychologically, but I’m saying, “Look, I’m making what I need, what I think is missing from my world. Is there anybody else out there who could use some of this, who needs this?” And through the years there’ve been enough people that have that I can continue. There have also been a lot of people who’ve said, “No, this is garbage. We don’t want this.” But, I offer up my insides, that’s all.

CERMATORI: So your feelings towards your audience haven’t changed.

FOREMAN: Haven’t changed a bit.

CERMATORI: A side question: who is your audience now?

FOREMAN: Well, it hasn’t changed that much in a sense, I mean, there’s a fair amount of people, some of whom have been seeing my work that come up to me and say, “Oh I’ve been seeing your plays for twenty, thirty, forty years!” You know, people with interests in aggressive contemporary art, obviously a lot of students also. We get a pretty big mix. A lot of students and a lot of people who I guess you’d call culturally-oriented people.

CERMATORI: What about your past and present thoughts on: “language” and “images”?

FOREMAN: Well, when I started, I tried to reinvent language for myself. I started using a very primitive kind of language that was registering sensations in the body. I did not want to talk ideas or complex philosophical notions. I wanted to go back to the basics. Then, the language started getting more complex. For the first eight years or so, people were saying, “Well he’s a pretty unusual, interesting director, but the content of his plays could be anything, it’s nonsense.” And I consciously really thought at one point , I want to prove to them that I’m a damn good writer. So the writing got more complex, more aphoristically oriented, wittier, and the big achievement of my life was when I started getting prizes for being a writer rather than just a director. Then, having written a lot of plays that got recognition as texts, language began to wear out for me. And I began to feel that all this manipulation of tricky language, it’s been done, it’s not really interesting, I want to hear the individual words. I want to get into the sounds of language. Even not so much the spoken sounds, but how does the word “tree” reverberate in you when you hear it. It’s a little akin to the way so many contemporary musicians no longer write tunes but are interested in exploring noises, getting to the center of notes and noises. So my style started getting much sparser. And these days I’m just writing these little phrases, that usually come over tape that I’m recording in a deep voice, overlapping with other phrases. And I described that years ago as taking a sentence or a phrase, dropping it down a well, listening to it reverberate in the bottom of the well. And that’s really my aim now. But language is still, even though I use fewer and fewer words, the center of my work. I can’t imagine starting a production without some kind of text.

CERMATORI: And what about “images in the theater”?

FOREMAN: Well, at the very beginning people described my theater as a “theater of images” along with people like Bob Wilson and Lee Breuer. I never really thought that. It comes easily to me. When I was a kid, my first talents were drawing and painting, and I theorize about everything, but I don’t theorize about that because I just do that and because I do it so easily it’s not central in a way. It just happens automatically. Though I realize a lot of what I do in terms of imagery is pretty intelligent and pretty slick, but my feeling is: well, anybody can do that. [Laughs.]

CERMATORI: Okay. How about: “the mind,” and “consciousness”?

FOREMAN: Well that’s always been my focal point, whatever that means. Years ago, I was very upset because in an interview Susan Sontag said, when asked about me, “Well, you know, Foreman’s okay. I like his essays better than his plays because he says his plays are about consciousness and that’s a misunderstanding because there is no such thing as consciousness. There’s political consciousness. There’s sexual consciousness. But just consciousness is meaningless.” Well, I think she was wrong. And I think there’s plenty of work being done nowadays that is trying to isolate what is the neural activity, what are the clicks that are going on in consciousness: what is this thing called consciousness? And I see no reason why that can’t be the focal point for intense activity.

CERMATORI: Okay: “melancholy.”

RF Ah! I’ve always been melancholy. I’ve always taken sort of a bleak point of view. I think the world is always going to hell. It is now certainly, but it always has been, and we are all of us, myself included, broken, fallible human beings who function to a tiny degree of our capability, and don’t really make contact most of the time with better energies in ourselves, and that’s a melancholy fact.

CERMATORI: On that subject, what about: “emotions”? And especially: “emotions in the theater”?

FOREMAN: Well I don’t believe in emotions that normal people believe in as being so effective in the theater. I believe that pushing the normal emotional buttons in the theater is just deepening people’s training, deepening people’s conditioning. Yes: you’re gonna cry when a little child gets hit by a car. That can be very effective in a movie and make you cry. But it just deepens your emotional, habitual patterns. And for me, the task of art is to make you rise above those and see things freshly. Now I think my theater is full of feelings and sensations as opposed to emotions. All art is built out of feelings. How do you feel when this red wall is suddenly seen behind somebody who’s saying something? It’s a specific feeling, and every element of the theater evokes feelings like that.

CERMATORI: “Minimalism”? “Boredom”?

FOREMAN: When minimalism came in in the art world, I thought—Ah!—that this was the first movement that I really felt at home with, in which I thought people would understand me. Very soon I realized that I was much more of a Romantic than the real minimalists are. And my art has always been more complex and multilayered than true minimalism, even though minimalism was terribly moving to me when it happened. These days, I do tell myself again and again, I don’t want to have a big effect on people. I want to find out how to make what seems uninflected—what seems less spectacular and involving—nevertheless interesting as something that consciousness can focus on and refocus on and refocus on. And if it gets too exciting, you lose track of yourself watching it, and that’s what’s important.

CERMATORI: How about: “the baroque”?

FOREMAN: What can I say? I’m a baroque artist. I like the twists that the baroque artist gives to the elements that he is working in. I think it’s only by twisting and squeezing things that you produce cracks in the surface in which the inner light shines through.

CERMATORI: How about: “critics”?

FOREMAN: [Laughs.] Well, I have to be careful, don’t I? [Laughs.] There have been one or two critics who have written things that I’ve found useful and illuminating, but it’s very hard. I’m somebody who would love to be like those people who claim they don’t read the critics. I do read the critics. And even if it’s a critic who I think is not a good critic and he doesn’t like what I do, I’m upset for two days. I wish I didn’t have to have this compunction to read critics, because they don’t really do me any good and they just upset me.

CERMATORI: What about: “the color brown”?

FOREMAN: Well, in my early years, everything was brown. All my sets were brown for, I don’t know how long, ten or fifteen years. The carpeting at my theater is brown: that’s a return. Brown is… both earth and shit. And chocolate. [Laughs.] So, I think that encompasses the whole world, right?